reviewsnthoughts

A Tale of Two Bizarre Moms

On the West Coast we have Nadya Suleiman, the 33-year-old single mom who, in addition to already having six children, recently gave birth to octuplets at the Kaiser Permamente Hospital  in Bellflower, Calfornia,. Meanwhile, in an Orlando jail cell another mom, Casey Anthony, sat alone, thinking who-knows-what even as her murdered daughter, Caylee Marie was given a public funeral.

While Ms. Suleiman is not – as far as I know – an evil person per se, she and Casey Anthony do share one trait that turns most rational people against them.  Though one is notorious for wanting to bring babies into this world and the other robbed her daughter of her right to exist, they both have a high level of egocentrism that borders on the extreme.

Curiously, while very few people support Octo-Mom in her never-ending quest for having a large family because she herself was an only child, someone, somewhere, is sending money to Casey Anthony in that Central Florida jailhouse.

Considering that Casey is not working and that her parents must be the ones paying for her defense team, how else can the woman Nancy Grace calls “Tot Mom” afford all the extra snacks and meals she’s getting in prison?  I stopped watching Nancy Grace because Caylee’s sad tale has affected me terribly even though I don’t know any of the people involved, but I doubt that Casey was able to smuggle her bank account into the Orlando jail where she’s been confined since her arrest.  But one of the last things I heard was that she has supporters who write her letters and send her cash or checks.  (I wonder if any of those are from men who hope to get in bed with her on the odd chance that she’s acquitted?)

If this is true, Casey is luckier than Octo-Mom.  If anyone is giving her any financial support after becoming the poster child for self-indulgent people, it must be the world’s best kept secret; in most of the forums and bulletin boards where Nadya Suleiman (or Suleman) is mentioned, there are salacious (and inaccurate) theories about how many men have been in bed with her.  There is also an almost unanimous sentiment that responsible Californians should not have to foot all the bills that are inevitably going to be incurred as a result of this one-woman baby boom.

So here we have a case of two Generation Me moms.  One is a bit obsessed with populating the Earth by herself no matter what, while the other was so self-absorbed that she took her daughter’s life to have no responsibilities.

 Although I’ve written literally over a thousand reviews about many different products, it’s a fair bet to say that my favorite subject to write about is movies, both theatrical and made-for-TV ones.

It all started when I was struggling to find out which “beat” or section of my high school student newspaper I wanted to be assigned in.  Because I’d been “drafted” into my first journalism class by my ninth-grade teacher before I even set foot inside South Miami High, I literally felt like a fish out of water in Mr. Gary Bridge’s Newspaper Reporting and Editing class.

Fortunately, we were issued a huge hardcover textbook that covered all the essential points of a journalism course.  Topics ranged from what picas and fonts are to the thorny issues of what constitutes libel, and somewhere in between there were chapters devoted to each section (News, Features, Sports, Op/Ed) in an average student newspaper.

I browsed through these chapters rather half-heartedly, not really feeling very confident that I’d ever write for the more important News or popular Sports sections.  Ditto for Features, which seemed to call for writers with a better grip on wit and details than I thought I had at the time.

However, when I came to the section on review writing, especially movie reviews, I was a bit more hopeful about my future at the student paper.

I don’t remember the title of the text book nor who wrote it, but in that chapter there was a complete review of Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, complete with helpful analysis and “how-to” hints from the author (or authors.)

Though I also can’t remember the review itself - I read it in early September of 1980, after all - I remember that I adopted certain techniques and rules from it and the textbooks instructions which I still use in my online reviews.

•1.       Draw the reader in with a relevant intro:  This isn’t always easy to do, especially if you’re writing the 10^th or 140^th review of a well-known movie.  There are ways to help you avoid either sounding like just one more voice in a choir or parroting someone else’s opinion; not reading others’ review on your topic helps, of course, but choosing relevant select details works even better.

•2.       Don’t be afraid to show your knowledge:  A good online reviewer knows that he or she has a lot of competitors and different opinions, so it’s best to use all the tools at your disposal to stand out in a crowd and grab readers’ attention.  You might want to, for instance, take a bit of trivia about a movie or series of movies and carefully inject into a review’s lead, as I did in my review of The Star Wars Prequel Trilogy box set:

“In May of 1999, 22 years after beginning his Star Wars saga in mid-tale with the film he later re-titled Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope, writer-director George Lucas took millions of viewers back to that galaxy far, far away when his company, Lucasfilm Limited, and 20th Century Fox released Star Wars - Episode I: The Phantom Menace.”

• 3. Avoid complex references within the text of a review: While a good reviewer strives to be as informative and detailed whenever possible, you must try to adopt a shorthand that can convey a more complex statement without being wordy.

Example, say you want to mention in a review of Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back that it was written by the guy who wrote Body Heat and Raiders of the Lost Ark and directed by the guy who helmed The Eyes of Laura Mars.

Clunky: Executive producer George Lucas hired Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote both Body Heat and Raiders of the Lost Ark, to write the screenplay, while to take over as director, he hired Irvin Kershner, best known for The Eyes of Laura Mars.

Now, while you might have a great deal of relevant facts there, that sentence is too long and unwieldy.

Better: To bring The Empire Strikes Back to the big screen, executive producer George Lucas brought in writer Lawrence Kasdan (Body Heat, Raiders of the Lost Ark) and director Irvin Kershner (The Eyes of Laura Mars).

•4.       Never give away the whole plot or the ending of a movie:  No matter if you’re writing about a  film just starting its first run or a classic such as Gone With the Wind, never, ever summarize more of a plot than the middle of the second act.  Your job as a reviewer is not to tell viewers everything you saw or heard in the movie; it is to sway them to see (or not) the movie or TV show in question.  You have to always assume that you are writing about something your reader has never seen or used before, even if that assumption is wrong.  Spoilers in a review are called that because, well, they spoil a movie goer’s experience by revealing things best left for the audience to discover.

“All I ever wanted was children.” - Nadya Suleiman.

 What was she thinking?

 It’s been a bit over 10 days since the world woke up to the news that a woman in California had given birth to the second of only two successful deliveries of eight babies, but after an initial collective “Aww, how sweet” reaction from most people, public opinion has taken an opposite turn as more details surface about the initially mysterious mom and her apparent obsession with having babies.

In previous cases of multiple births - starting with the Dionne Quintuplets in the early 1930s - which attract media attention, most people have reacted positively, particularly if it’s a situation in which a married couple had been trying to raise a family for many years but had had problems conceiving a baby.   “Miracle babies” often get sympathy votes from the press, baby product companies and the general public as a whole.

And at first, when most of us heard or read about the anonymous patient who gave birth to the octuplets at the Kaiser Permamente Hospital in Bellflower, CA, we did have a brief moment of collective wonder.  Wow.  Eight babies.  Only the second such set of live babies born in the U.S.  Over 40 doctors and nurses involved in the delivery.

The era of good feeling has been extremely short lived, however.  With each passing day, the public sentiment has done a 180-degree turn from Aww to Ugh.

Far from being born to a long-suffering couple which had turned to in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to help them overcome fertility problems, the six boys and two girls have a single and presently unemployed “professional student” for a mother - 33-year-old Nadya Suleiman.

Now, most people understand that millions of single mothers have successfully raised kids on their own with or without assistance from any government agencies.  Additionally, most Americans tend to shy away from commenting on how many children a mother should be allowed to bring into the world.

But with Ms. Suleiman, the fact that she’s used IVF methods (and using the sperm of only one donor) not just in this instance but several times and now has a total of 14 children has created a huge backlash.

In the Whittier (CA) Daily News’ website, a reader expressed what seems to be the majority view when he wrote, “Nadya Suleman is a single 33 year old unemployed woman with six fatherless children (one of whom has autism) who lives with her bankrupt parents and intentionally had 8 more children who will probably have long term medical problems themselves due to her stupid decisions. Who’s going to pay for these 14 children?”

And even as California’s medical board is thinking about investigating the doctor who knowingly implanted multiple fetuses into Suleiman’s womb in violation of established IVF guidelines,  Nadya is coming across as an obsessive baby factory rather than a sympathetic mother figure.

According to her mother - who said she wants no part in this octuplets-raising business - Nadya had wanted another girl desperately.

All this would be fine and good with most people if Ms. Suleiman wasn’t coming across as a somewhat sleazy and nutty person who has been staying at home for more than 10 years after a work-related injury sidelined her from a career as a social worker at a mental institution.  And the fact that she hired a publicist and allegedly was hoping to get paid seven figures for her television interviews hasn’t helped her already tarnished image about being self-centered and greedy.

As to what she was thinking? 

In her interview with NBC’s Ann Curry, Nadya Suleiman revealed her motives when she said, “That was always a dream of mine, to have a large family, a huge family, and I just longed for certain connections and attachments with another person that I really lacked, I believe, growing up.”

What, six kids weren’t enough?

 All right. Recently we covered how to write about products or services we don’t like; let’s discuss the equally important topic of reviewing things we do like.

Though this might sound strange, it’s sometimes harder to write a good review about, say, a favorite movie or book objectively.  Two things can happen:  a reviewer (especially one who is just starting out) gets writer’s block trying to figure out how to write a positive review about something he or she really likes.  Or, conversely, he or she can end up getting carried away with the lavish praise.  Either of these is bad; writer’s block will affect productivity, and reviewers who can’t pull back and look at a product with some sangfroid will lose credibility.

Though there is no “set in stone” formula for writing reviews, especially in the various online reviewers’ communities, here are a few helpful hints on how to write positive yet credible reviews on just about any product.

•1.       Approach the topic as though you have never used/seen/read/listened to it before.   Sometimes it’s best to take an “internal” step back from, say, a movie one likes and look at it with fresh eyes, as it were.  Gazing upon something with a more detached, more critical attitude doesn’t mean one has to dissect a film along the lines of The Dark Knight or the original Star Wars and tear it to shreds by finding every flaw in it.  However, acknowledging that a sentimental favorite movie or book may not be as “perfect” as one fondly remembers it lends a review a certain level of credibility.

•2.       Avoid hyperbole.  Some reviewers tend to identify way too much with a product (usually a movie, book or musical act) and feel obliged to act as PR agents rather than objective critics.  They’ll write “This is the greatest (fill in the blank) of all time!”   While some readers aren’t bothered by this, many of them find this rather off-putting.  After all, most people have not seen every movie ever made or read every book yet written, so how can it be “the greatest of all time”?

•3.       Strike a balance between “detail” and opinion.  While it is important to give a reader enough information about a product, remember not to overdo the product description to the exclusion of your opinion of it.  It’s important to focus on key points and most-used features; it’s also very crucial that a review does not give away too much of a movie or describes every possible color scheme available of a DVD player’s casing.   What is important, though, is that the review has a writer’s honest views on why it’s good, hopefully with well-thought out points on why it is good.

One of the first questions most reviewers ask when they either join a school newspaper staff or an online review site is “Do we have to only write positive reviews about (books, movies, or whatever), or can we write negative ones as well?”

The answer, of course, is no, of course not. A good review writer should always feel free to express his or her opinion about a place, product or service, especially in a consumer-review site such as Epinions or Viewpoints.  After all, your “mission” is to provide readers with the information to make a purchasing decision.

Now, writing a negative review doesn’t mean using a mean-spirited tone or being obnoxious just to make a point.  While it’s tempting to reduce a review about something you had a negative experience with to a minimalistic “This (fill in the blank) sucks,” it really doesn’t help a reader out much, especially if he or she wants to know about (fill in the blank) before making a purchase or going to, say, a restaurant or doctor’s office.

For instance, I once wrote a review of Jaws 4: The Revenge, the third (and lamest) sequel to Steven Spielberg’s classic horror/action adventure/drama, Jaws.

I suppose I could have merely written what Epinions calls an “Express Review” of 200 words or so which gave readers a brief synopsis of that 1987 movie and added “steer clear of this one” at the end, but I decided to use a wry tone which poked fun at the film’s badness while still being informative.
 

Jaws: The Revenge (also known as Jaws 4) is one of the best examples of totally worthless sequels. It makes  More American Graffiti look like a masterpiece worthy of a zillion Academy Awards, and it is even sillier than Jurassic Park III (which doesn’t even have a Michael Crichton novel to justify its existence on film).  Written by Michael de Guzman and directed by Joseph Sargent, this movie asks us to suspend our disbelief so much that we’d accept the following plot points:

1. White sharks can either come back from the dead or develop a sense of Mafia-like vendettas against members of a specific family.

2. White sharks can travel over 1100 miles from the cold waters off Long Island to the warm waters of the northern Caribbean to follow a particular person.

3. A person can have vivid flashbacks (through the magic of archival footage from Jaws) of events he or she did not witness in person.

Of course, not every negative review has to depend on biting humor along these lines, but it helps if you choose an entertaining-yet-informative approach instead of a savage and angry tone in a review of something you did not have a good experience.

 Remember, when writing a negative review, you need to engage, rather than alienate, your reader.   Angry ranting about a shoddy movie, unfriendly restaurant staff, or an unreadable book never helps you obtain a reputation as a trustworthy reviewer. 
  

 

Gabriel Delrisco is a menace to society.

One week ago, a south Miami-Dade County family was destroyed  because Delrisco, who has had 26 traffic violations over the past eight  years, rammed his SUV into their Ford Windstar minivan at a stoplight on South Dixie Highway and SW 211^th Street.

In less than an instant, Mirian and Hector Serrano lost their three children – Hector, 10, Esmeralda, 7, and Amber, 4 – when Delrisco, a former truck driver turned mobile ultrasound operator, struck the rear of their minivan at a high rate of speed.

According to various accounts in South Florida media outlets, there were no skid marks at the scene to indicate Delrisco made an effort to brake his SUV.

The 40-year-old Delrisco’s post-accident blood test revealed an alcohol content three times over the state limit of .08.  A second test, taken at the hospital where Delrisco was treated, still showed above-the-limit traces of alcohol in his system 24 hours after the incident that left Hector and Mirian Serrano without their three children.

The worst thing about this is that, as is often the case in South Florida, Delrisco still had a valid driver’s license despite having been stopped and given various traffic and moving violation tickets – 26 in all – since 2001.

To anyone who lives in South Florida it’s no secret that the area is one of the most dangerous driving environments in the nation.  There is no reliable or inexpensive public transportation system in Miami-Dade County, and its rapid growth from a medium-sized Southern tourist city to a congested metropolis made Miami and its surrounding communities extensively car-dependent.

The Serrano’s tragedy began when Hector woke his three children up and placed them in the passenger compartment of the family minivan to drop off wife Mirian at Jackson Memorial Hospital.  It was before dawn, and Hector did not want to leave the kids alone at home while he made the long commute from Homestead to downtown Miami.

It was what any responsible man would have done, but he was placing his faith on the broken beyond repair traffic courts system and on luck that if he had gone to drop off his wife at Jackson without incident before, why should last Sunday have been any different?  After all, he was only a few blocks away from his own home when he stopped at the soon-to-be fatal intersection.

Serrano was like many in South Florida who are unaware of just how bad things are for drivers and pedestrians here.  Not only do people who don’t´drink drive like demons anyway, but the traffic courts system here is badly broken .

In a county with millions of cars and drivers, traffic courts are now overburdened, hamstrung when the ticketing officer either is a no-show in court or writes up a driver for the wrong infraction, and perceived as a cash machine for local governments at a time of decreasing property taxes.

Perhaps that’s why a menace to society such as Gabriel Delrisco still has a valid driver’s license despite a long list of infractions, which include various charges of reckless driving, driving the wrong way on an expressway, and a DUI conviction which resulted in a six-month suspension of his driver’s license.

You’d think that after so many tickets and that DUI conviction that Delrisco would have stopped drinking before getting behind the wheel or, when sober, driving with a bit more care.  But, no.  His  need for booze and the thrill of driving recklessly – his selfish indulgences – led him to slam into the Serranos’ minivan and killing three innocent kids.

The excuse given to us by the legal system is that traffic courts are jammed to the limit.  Judges often have to let people like Delrisco go free with adjudication of records if the accused pay the fines and go to traffic school.

Fortunately, on the same day that Hector, Esmeralda and Amber Serrano were buried, a Miami-Dade judge denied him bond and ordered him kept behind bars.

 

“I hope he fails.” – Rush Limbaugh, January 16, 2009

One of the most important lessons that I learned as a journalism student back in the 1980s is one that I have always tried to live by, “Never say or write anything incendiary just to get the audience’s attention.”

It might seem somewhat naïve or old-fashioned, but when I read in a Leonard Pitts column that Rush Limbaugh, a well-known conservative radio talk show host with a huge radio and television audience, had said that he hoped that incoming President Barack Obama would fail at his duties, I was stunned.

Considering that Limbaugh is famous –or infamous – for being a very aggressive expounder of the conservative right’s more extreme views, perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised.  After all, Limbaugh is the same man who claimed that comedian Al Franken had “stolen” the election for Minnesota’s Senate seat from his Republican opponent, Norm Coleman.  Additionally, Limbaugh also stated that former President Bush didn’t start thinking about firing “liberal-minded” U.S. Attorneys until “well into his second term.”

Because I find most of the so-called conservative TV and radio commentators unpleasant to watch or listen to, I missed the actual radio program in which Limbaugh expressed his wish that the new President would not succeed during his first term in office.  But since almost everything a public figure says or writes anywhere in the traditional media gets recorded on the Internet, I was able to dig up Limbaugh’s comments.

So I’m thinking of replying to the guy, “Okay, I’ll send you a response, but I don’t need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails.” (interruption) What are you laughing at? See, here’s the point. Everybody thinks it’s outrageous to say. Look, even my staff, “Oh, you can’t do that.” Why not? Why is it any different, what’s new, what is unfair about my saying I hope liberalism fails? Liberalism is our problem. Liberalism is what’s gotten us dangerously close to the precipice here. Why do I want more of it? I don’t care what the Drive-By story is. I would be honored if the Drive-By Media headlined me all day long: “Limbaugh: I Hope Obama Fails.” Somebody’s gotta say it.

  Having grown up in the 1970s and 1980s, I have a strong dislike for political extremes in both the conservative and liberal camps.  I’m old enough to remember the excesses of the anti-war movement during the Vietnam War and the resulting cuts in defense spending by a Democratic-controlled Congress.  I thought that the ultra-liberals back then were wrong in their message that America was on its way to becoming a fascist nation and that capitalism was evil, and I still think they were misguided.

On the other hand, I’m appalled when a guy like Rush Limbaugh, who once said he was merely an entertainer but is now one of the loudest purveyors of the extreme conservative message, blames all, and I mean all, of our country’s problems on liberalism.

Does Limbaugh really think that the best solution for America’s problems is for Barack Obama to screw up?  Does he want the American economy to tank even worse than it has over the past few years when there was a Republican President in charge so that Sarah Palin or another like-minded candidate can be elected in 2012?  Does he want American soldiers – our men and women in uniform – to die because Obama “goofed” so he and his equally strident buds can say “Hey, America, we told you so…”?

I can understand if serious-minded Republicans, independents and even Democrats disagree with the new President’s policies.  Dissent and civil discourse are part of what makes a democracy healthy and prosperous.  I’m sure that I won’t agree with some of the President’s ideas – his proposal to postpone the February 17, 2009 switch from analog TV signals to digital till June is one – but as an American citizen, I don’t want Obama to fail.

Apparently, no one taught Limbaugh the notion that once an election is over, the President of the United States represents all of us, whether we voted for him or not.  When he travels abroad to meet with other heads of state, he is us.  When he gains popularity in other countries, we all are perceived in a better light, not just him.  When he succeeds, we all succeed.  When he fails, we all suffer the consequences.

If Limbaugh said “I hope he fails” just to be inflammatory, it certainly doesn’t reflect well on his character.  It proves that his viewpoints are morally and intellectually bankrupt since he offers no plausible or positive alternatives.  It’s also somewhat immature – it’s the opinion-making equivalent of a bully pulling someone’s pants down then sniggering “Ha ha!” like Nelson from The Simpsons.

On the other hand, if Limbaugh really loves his country as much as he claims he does, he should bear in mind these words, written by President John Adams in 1800:

“I pray Heaven to Bestow The Best of Blessing on THIS HOUSE, and on ALL that shall hereafter Inhabit it. May none but Honest and Wise Men ever rule under This Roof!” - Letter to Abigail Adams, referring to the White House, November 2, 1800

 Back in the 1980s, when I was starting out as a journalism student at Miami-Dade Community College (now Miami Dade College), I learned a valuable lesson about the benefits of avoiding overspecialization.

While it’s true that focusing on one particular interest gives a writer a certain depth of knowledge, ‘tis folly to not broaden your horizons and expand your knowledge about the wider world around you to become a bit more versatile.

A case in point: In high school - which is where I first studied journalism - I was not keen on having to interview other students, faculty members or even administrators for stories, so I asked to for an assignment  to the Entertainment beat instead.  My reasoning was, “If I’m told to go see X movie and do a review, I don’t have to worry about interviews!” 

Though this was not exactly the way it turned out - I did have to conduct interviews for at least two articles that first year - I managed to become more of a movies-and-books specialist during my two stints as an entertainment writer at South Miami High.

But when I signed up for JOU1101 (Basic Reporting and Editing) at M-DCC, I quickly learned that sticking only to one field or “beat” limits was not a good idea, especially if I wanted to earn good grades and a reputation as a good writer.

To be honest, this wasn’t what I consciously planned.  Even though by the time I was 21 I was getting over my phobia of interviewing people, I still wanted to play it safe and stick to the Entertainment beat.  Indeed, when I sought out my first assignment as a staff writer for the campus newspaper, I took on a story about three M-DCC ensembles’ first recordings. 

This particular assignment was a nerve-racking baptism by fire, so to speak. It involved not one but three interviews, and because the campus paper was a weekly publication rather than a monthly, I had a much shorter deadline to meet than I used to.

To make a long story short, I got my first byline with only minimal editing done by my journalism professor, and because I’d done everything fairly well I was asked if I wanted to be the assistant Opinions Editor.

I almost turned it down.  After all, I thought of myself as being strictly an Entertaiment beat writer.  I had never written an editorial, never solicited an Op/Ed article from a faculty member nor thought about being a more wide-ranging columnist.

On the other hand, I did want to pass my first college journalism class with a B or better, as well as impressing my professor and my colleagues.  I wouldn’t achieve either of these goals by sticking to the tried-and-true and playing it safe.  So, fighting back my shyness and apprehensions, I accepted it.

Good thing, too; less than two weeks into the job I was promoted to Copy Editor (a story which I’ll relate another day), and by the end of the semester I was chosen as the Opinions Editor for the following term.  I still got to do movie reviews and such during my years on the newspaper staff, but I was also able to contribute to every section of the paper, including News, Features and - surprisingly - Sports.  I even wangled my way to becoming the staff’s first foreign correspondent when I went to Spain for one semester.

I doubt, looking back, that I would have accomplished all those things had I decided to overspecialize in one narrow field of interest.

 In the 1930s and ‘40s, one of America’s most popular singers was a young woman from Greenville, Virginia named Kate Smith, who not only popularized Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” - considered by many to be the nation’s second national anthem - during World War II, but was a superstar throughout the golden age of radio.

Indeed, Smith was what one might call a Renaissance woman; not only could she sins songs like “River, Stay ‘Way From My Door” and “The White Cliffs of Dover” with her rich and powerful voice,  she also had comedic and dramatic talent as well. Her radio variety show, The Kate Smith Hour, was one of the most popular series on the airwaves for eight years, featuring stars along the lines of Abbott and Costello and Henny Youngman as a radio precursor to “Your Show of Shows” and “Saturday Night Live.”

Smith also made the leap from radio to the new medium known as television, appearing on talk shows, variety shows, and music specials well into the 1950s.

Interestingly, Smith wasn’t only a big star popularity-wise, but she was also literally big.  In 1937, when she was 30 years old, she weighed 235 pounds.

Now, of course, there were recording industry execs, managers and even other singers who made fun of Smith’s full figure and weight, but that didn’t affect her one successful career or popularity one bit.  In a 1938 autobiography, Smith gave one of her managers credit for her success and thanked him for his belief in her talent, saying, “Ted Collins was the first man who regarded me as a singer, and didn’t even seem to notice that I was a big girl.”  In the same book she also wrote, “I’m big, and I sing, and boy, when I sing, I sing all over!”

Smith, of course, was a superstar in a less shallow and far less sex-driven musical industry when a female vocalist was known more for her singing talent than for her physical attributes.  So were Ethel Merman, Ella Fitzgerald, Janis Joplin, and Mama Cass, who were legendary Broadway, jazz and rock singers. Although those women straddled different eras and genres, they had loads of creative and artistic talent that outweighed their lack of “hotness.”

In the Age of Britney

Now, of course, it is hard to visualize a modern-day Kate Smith getting past, say, the Miami or San Antonio auditions of Fox’s “American Idol” unless she were to go on a Slim-Fast Diet or be a contestant on NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” before deciding to try out.  With perhaps the exception of hip-hop’s Queen Latifah, many of today’s top women of music seem to be more Playboy centerfold-ready than they are songbirds.

Take, for instance, 27-year-old Britney Spears.  She’s been in show business for more than half her life, appearing as a Mouseketeer in Disney’s The New Mickey Mouse Club in the early 1990s, singing briefly in the all-girl group Innosense, then striking out on her own in 1997 as an opener for the Backstreet Boys and other acts.

Even though Spears has a strong soprano voice and used it effectively in her first big hit “…Baby One More Time” in 1998, she began to be “sexualized” almost as soon as she left the protective shadow of Mickey Mouse’s ears.  A controversial cover story in which Spears wore revealing outfits that included black push-up bras and very tiny black shorts was published in 1999 by Rolling Stone magazine.  This was the first - but not the last - instance in which Spears used her looks to imply a cross between childlike innocence and adult eroticism.

As Spears matured from teen to young adult, her sexy singer persona became more dominant, with maybe too much emphasis on “sexy.”   This trend is illustrated by the famous girl-girl kiss she shared with Madonna at the 2003 MTV Music Video Awards ceremony.  (It is hard to imagine Kate Smith in a lip-lock with, say, Lena Horne or Edith Piaf….)   

But “hotness” - which comes and goes over time - does not a successful career make in show business if it’s not matched by creative or even performing skills.   Spears is reasonably attractive, at least in the eyes of some, but she’s not as good a singer as Beyonce or even newcomer Katie Perry, and her acting is so-so. (Her one big attempt to be a movie actress, the movie Crossroads, tanked; her appearances on various TV sitcoms have fared a bit better.)

Sadly, thanks to the globalization of the media and the emphasis of sexuality over true talent means that girls with great voices but not-so-great-looks - the Kate Smiths of the 21^st Century - will have to take a back seat to the Playboy-ready Britney Spears and “Bikini Girls” who ooze physical hotness but might want to take Remedial Music 101 workshops.

 I’m not, by definition, a gamer, i.e., someone who buys a computer with all the bells and whistles that make it optimal for playing the latest computer games and then spends a king’s ransom on every possible game at the local GameStop or Electronic Boutique. 

Once upon a time, though, I was - at the very least - a casual gamer who did have more than a passing interest in motherboards, graphics cards, and, above all, memory chips and CPUs that could manage both the more prosaic business applications a college student/struggling writer needs as well as the coolest flight simulators, strategy simulations, and - yes - Star Wars games.

At first, what some tech experts label “legacy issues” or software-hardware incompatibility didn’t affect me much.  In the pre-Windows era when MS-DOS was the basic operating system, I owned very few IBM/PC games and, because they weren’t as graphics-intensive or memory hogs, they were usually retroactively compatible with newer CPU/DOS combinations.  (In other words, if I bought MicroProse Labs’ Silent Service II or Sid Meier’s Civilization while I owned a an IBM “clone” with an Intel 386 CPU and MS-DOS 3, they’d still run if I upgraded to the next level of CPU and operating system….usually with better performance than on the PC system they had originally been designed for.

It is, perhaps, a computer user’s cliche, but it seems that every 16 months or so, on average, new computer hardware and software is introduced.  Hard drives, which once were measured in mere megabytes in the 1990s, now usually contain several gigabytes of storage space.  The old Intel 386s now seem puny in comparison to the Pentium Dual Cores which have supplanted the x86 series of chips, and video cards now require more power and memory to run 3D graphics that could only be dreamed of by wide-eyed, pie-in-the-sky techno-geeks.

This constant updating and upgrading of technology, while offering 21st Century gamers of all types and skill levels better graphics, better sound, and smarter Artificial Intelligence opponents, does have its unattractive side.

Consider this.  Over the past 20 years or so, the transition of one storage medium to another has meant that I’ve lost the abiility to use a lot of the software I’ve purchased over the years.  I didn’t have too many programs that installed from the larger 5.25-in floppies, but at least one flight sim needed to boot up from the “A” drive, which required that type of diskette.  When PC manufacturers got rid of the 5.25-in drives, I had to stop using F-15 Strike Eagle III.

Now, of course, even the 3.5-in floppies - which look so much like the memory tapes used in the 1960s version of Star Trek - are no longer usable.  The last time I saw a brand-new PC with a floppy drive was five years ago; the Windows version on that - XP - still could run at least one MS-DOS game and ran it well.   Now, even if Vista supported that version of DOS (I think it was DOS 5.0), how would I be able to physically get the software into the PC without a floppy drive.  Now we have CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives; within five years I foresee Blu-ray-ROM drives becoming commonplace.

As accustomed to changes in technology as anyone who grew up in the Computer Age, I still wish that the geniuses at Microsoft would please consider those of us who embrace progress, yet would like, just for once, to be able to pull out a cherished computer game’s CD-ROM and be able to install it onto a system like Vista….without having to say, “Well, at least it can be a nice looking coaster!”